There's a variety of optical storage media with different data capacities, such as CDs and DVDs. In order to increase the capacity of a disc with a certain fixed diameter, the track pitch and the channel bit length have to be reduced, which requires a reduction of the laser spot size, i.e. a reduction of the used laser wave length. Currently, disc recording systems are under development which use blue laser diodes with a wave length of 405 nm.
For example, there is an emerging standard for a high capacity optical disc recording format which utilises blue-violet laser light and which is called ‘blu-ray disc’, or “BD” disc. A copy of the blue-ray disc standard can be obtained from Royal Phillips Electronics, Intellectual Property and Standards, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
In order to increase the storage density further, the channel bit length is reduced to a higher degree than the gain in spot size reduction due to the shorter wave length, i.e. the ratio between the spot size and the channel bit length, which is known as the “information density”, is increasing.
In fact, the optical channel behaves like a lowpass filter and the transfer function is known as the “modulation transfer function”, or shortly MTF, in the literature.
For high data storage densities on optical discs, the modulation transfer function drops very steeply, i.e. the high frequency components of the analog read signal are attenuated considerably compared to the low frequency components. For example for a BD disc with a storage capacity of 25 GBytes, the shortest run-length components (2T) are attenuated by a factor of more than 20 dB compared to the longest run-lengths of 8T. This results in a large amount of inter-symbol interference (ISI), which is the reason that the eye-pattern, i.e. the HF signal obtained by summing the currents of the four elements of the photo detector (“Read channel 1, RDCH1”), is nearly closed, even without noise.
In order to recover the user data stored on a high density optical disc, a Partial-Response Maximum-Likelihood (PRML) detection scheme is typically used. In a standard Partial-Response Maximum-Likelihood (PRML) detection system, a FIR filter with for example 7 taps is used for the equalization of the incoming signal to the selected partial-response target. If the equalization is made adaptively in order to further improve the data detection reliability, for example with a hardware implementation of the LMS (least-mean-square) algorithm, a relatively high implementation effort is necessary.
On the other hand, the re-shaping of the incoming waveform to a simple partial-response target like PR(1, 2, 1) with a memory length of 2 delivers only non-optimum results, since the modulation transfer function (MTF) for a high-density optical disc is too different compared to PR(1, 2, 1), requiring a high gain boost of the higher frequency components of the signal. This has the drawback that the noise is also attenuated considerably.
The other possibility is to use a more complicated partial-response target with a memory length of 3, i.e. PR(1, 2, 2, 1), or even more. This has the advantage that the partial-response target frequency response is much more similar to the MTF of the optical channel and hence only a moderate amplification of the high frequency signal components is necessary. But the serious drawback is the high implementation effort needed (chip area) and that high processing speeds could not been achieved due to the complicated Viterbi detector.
For the jitter measurement, the blu-ray disc standard (BD) defines in its Annex 12.8 the so-called limit equalizer.
A limit equalizer is a non-linear equalizer which can boost the high frequency components without increasing the inter-symbol interference. Such an equalizer can improve the quality of the HF signal fed into the slicer and also reduces the jitter. Such limit equalizers are also known from:                (1) F. Yokogawa, S. Miyanabe, M. Ogasawara, H. Kuribayashi, Y. Tomita and K Yamamoto; Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 30 (2000) 819,        (2) S. Miyanabe, H. Kuribayashi and K. Yamamoto; Jpn J. Appl. Phys. 38 (1999) 1715,        (3) Yshimi Tomita, Hiroshi Nishiwaki, Shogo Miyanabe, Hiroki Kuribayashi, Kaoru Yamamoto and Fumihiko Yokogawa; Jpn J Apl. Phys Vol 40 (000) pp. 1716-1722, Part 1, No. 3B, March 2001.        
For example, a limit equalizer has a first stage with a conventional linear equalizer in order to reduce inter-symbol interference and boost the high frequency signal components. The limit equalisation is done after the linear equalisation. Before limiting the signal, the sampled data are interpolated. The configuration of the limit equalizer is almost the same as that of the FIR filter-type linear equalizer but the limiter limits the reproduced signal level except for the centre tap signal. The FIR filter acts as a high boost equalizer and its gain depends on the choice of a high boost coefficient. If the high boost coefficient becomes large then the gain of the FIR filter is high.